Friday, January 27, 2017

President Donald Trump takes the cap off a pen before signing executive order for immigration actions to build border wall as Vice President Mike Pence, left, and Homeland Security Secretary John F. Kelly, right, and others watch during Trump's a visit to the Homeland Security Department headquarters in Washington, Wednesday, Jan. 25, 2017. (Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP)

There's one fundamental difference between the new White House and the old when it comes to immigration: Barack Obama ordered his administration not to enforce a number of immigration laws. Donald Trump has ordered his administration to enforce them.

Trump's two immigration executive orders, issued Wednesday, are long, far-reaching, and complicated. But perhaps the most consequential passage in the two combined orders is a single sentence: "The purpose of this order is to direct executive departments and agencies to employ all lawful means to enforce the immigration laws of the United States."

That is the heart of Trump's immigration strategy. "We do not need new laws," the president said at the Department of Homeland Security Wednesday. "We will work within the existing system and framework."

Trump's proposal to build a wall on the Mexican border dominated coverage of the two executive orders. But the orders do much, much more than that — or at least they start the process of doing much, much more. For those who follow immigration closely, the Trump orders contain several critical provisions. Among them:

1) End "catch and release." In the Obama years, as thousands of people, mostly from Central America, crossed the Mexican border illegally — and made no effort to escape apprehension, asking for a "permiso" to stay — the border authorities would briefly detain them, give them a date to show up in court, and let them go. The practice was known as "catch and release."

It did not take a rocket scientist to predict that most, now safely inside the U.S., would not show up for court. With family units who arrived in that fashion, immigration court statistics gathered by the Center for Immigration Studies (a group which favors tighter immigration restrictions), reveal that 84 percent do not show up in court.

Under Trump's new directive, the Department of Homeland Security will now detain those illegal crossers and handle their cases on the spot. "The Secretary [of DHS] shall immediately take all appropriate actions to ensure the detention of aliens apprehended for violations ofimmigration law," the order on border enforcement says, "pending the outcome of their removal proceedings or their removal from the country to the extent permitted by law."

"They will be setting up detention facilities and have asylum officers and immigration judges on hand to deal with these cases right away, instead of releasing them into the country to disappear, or claim a work permit," notes the Center for Immigration Studies's Jessica Vaughan.

2) Put pressure on "sanctuary cities." Trump spoke often during the campaign about cities and counties that openly defy federal immigrationlaw. He frequently cited the case of Kate Steinle, the young woman murdered in San Francisco in 2015 by a criminal illegal immigrant who had been convicted of multiple felonies and deported multiple times, yet was still protected from another deportation by local officials enforcing San Francisco's sanctuary policy.

"Sanctuary jurisdictions across the United States willfully violate Federal law in an attempt to shield aliens from removal from the United States," the Trump order on interior enforcement says. The order would give the Attorney General and Secretary of Homeland Security the authority to determine "that jurisdictions that willfully refuse to comply with [federal law] are not eligible to receive federal grants, except as deemed necessary for law enforcement purposes by the Attorney General or the [DHS] Secretary."

Some leaders of sanctuary cities are already promising to fight the federal government. But some will likely yield to federal pressure — a remarkable change from the Obama years.

3) Speed deportations. Both the Obama administration and now Trump said they want to remove illegal immigrants who have committed serious crimes. But Obama waited until the immigrant in question had been convicted before even beginning what could be a lengthy removal process. The Trump interior enforcement order allows removal paperwork to begin at the time an illegal immigrant is charged, on the reasonable assumption that a person who is in the United States illegally to begin with, and is then charged with at least one additional crime, does not have a right to stay in the country indefinitely.

4) Follow the law in deporting "removable" illegal immigrants. "We cannot faithfully execute the immigration laws of the United States if we exempt classes or categories of removable aliens from potential enforcement," the order on interior enforcement says, referring to illegal immigrants who have been convicted of crimes, and in some cases deported multiple times, only to return to commit more crimes and endanger local communities. "I hereby direct agencies to employ all lawful means to ensure the faithful execution of the immigration laws of the United States against all removable aliens."

"I think it's very important that he is telling DHS officers in all three enforcement agencies that they will again have the discretion to enforce the law as written," says Vaughan, "and not be limited by arbitrary prioritization policies that have been so disastrous for public safety and that have encouraged more illegal immigration."

The Democrats have no playbook for dealing with a Republican who’s a populist.

U.S. President Donald Trump arrives for a roundtable meeting with labor leaders at the White House in Washington, U.S. January 23, 2017. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst

To see Week One of the Trump administration clearly, you have to do two things.

First, put to one side the incendiary comments, which now feel like small and daily data points within a greater cloud of crazy. Put aside the president’s preoccupations with crowd size, popularity, illegal voters—all the things he says that hurt him and not his foes. For the first time we have a president of whom people ask, with equanimity, each night at dinner tables: “What nutty thing did he say today?” No one has to explain who “he” is. Amazingly, we’re getting used to this. So is the world. Everything has more give than we think.

Second, with all the fighting over what’s happening politically, and the bitter tensions that are not abating, there is a personal imperative for most of us: Maintain your composure—your political and personal composure, your journalistic composure. Do not let this time rob you of your peace. You’ll be no good for anything if it does, and you won’t see anything clearly.

Substantively, what we’ve seen the past week was daring and bold. The administration is taking shape before our eyes, with unusual speed. Normally it takes time for the ideological disposition of an administration to emerge. Normally presidents ease into the job, rejecting the dramatic: “Don’t frighten the horses.”

That’s not what’s happening.

What happened from day one was a dramatic, almost daily barrage of executive orders. Among them: reinstating the 1984 ban on U.S. taxpayer funding of groups that provide abortions overseas; declaring the intention to create a physical barrier to secure the border with Mexico; moving forward on construction of the Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipelines; relieving the burdens of ObamaCare; and withdrawing from the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

All this marked more than the keeping of political promises, though that’s startling enough. It was a programmatic expression of the central assertion of President Trump’s inaugural address: I am a populist independent, allied not with the two major parties but with the working men and women of America. That it came like a barrage—Boom, pipeline! Boom, trade! Boom, abortion!—made it more unmistakable. But in case you missed his point, he told Maggie Haberman of the New York Times that yes, he’s chosen a presidential portrait to put in the Oval Office. It is fiery Andrew Jackson, tormentor of elites, champion of the 19th century’s deplorables.

The significance and velocity of the orders unnerved and upset Mr. Trump’s critics and took aback some of his friends. But those orders—even though their use makes the presidency more imperial, even though it’s no way to govern, even though Mr. Obama did it, too—will likely not be unpopular in the country. It actually looked as if someone wasdoing something.

More important than the orders were the White House meetings. One was a breakfast with a dozen major CEOs. They looked happy as frolicking puppies in the photo-op, and afterward talked about jobs. Marillyn Hewson of Lockheed Martin said she was “encouraged by the president’s commitment to reduce barriers to job creation.” In a statement after the meeting, the glassmaker Corning, whose CEO attended, announced plans to expand its U.S. manufacturing base significantly over the next few years. Because I live in New York and work at the Journal, I see and talk to American CEOs. I’ve never heard them bang on about a need to boost American jobs and manufacturing, ever. They usually talk about targeted microloans in India, and robots.

More important still—the most important moment of the first week—was the meeting with union leaders. Mr. Trump gave them almost an hour and a half. “The president treated us with respect, not only our organization but our members,” said Terry O’Sullivan, general president of the Laborers’ International Union of North America, by telephone. Liuna had not endorsed Trump in the campaign, but Mr. O’Sullivan saw the meeting’s timing as an expression of respect: “He’s inaugurated on Friday and we’re invited in Monday to have a substantial conversation.” The entire Trump top staff was there, including the vice president: “His whole team—we were very impressed.” They talked infrastructure, trade and energy. “The whole meeting was about middle class jobs, how do we create more?” Mr. O’Sullivan believes the Keystone pipeline will eventually generate more than 40,000 jobs. Mr. O’Sullivan said he hopes fixing “our crumbling transportation infrastructure” will be “the largest jobs program in the country.”

The new president gave them a tour of the Oval Office. Presidents tend to develop a line of patter about the rug, the color of the drapes. Did Mr. Trump direct things in that way? No. “He gave us free rein, to tell you the truth.”

The lengthy, public and early meeting with the union leaders was, among other things, first-class, primo political pocket-picking. The Trump White House was showing the Democratic Party that one of its traditional constituent groups is up for grabs and happy to do business with a new friend. It was also telling those Republicans too stupid to twig onto it yet that the GOP is going to be something it’s actually been within living memory: the party of working men and women, a friend of those who feel besieged.

It’s a mistake for observers in Washington and New York to fixate on Mr. Trump’s daily faux pas at the expense of the political meaning of what he’s doing. He’s changing the face of the GOP. It is a mistake, too, to see Mr. Trump’s tweet on how Chicago had better solve its problem with violent crime or he’ll “send in the Feds,” as merely stupid—just a tweet that raises the question “What does ‘send in the Feds’ mean?” If you’re a parent in a tough Chicago neighborhood, you’d be heartened to think the feds might help. You’d be happy the president noticed. You’d say, “Go, Trump!”

All week I thought of one of the best pieces on the meaning of Trumpism, from last May, by Joshua Green in Bloomberg Businessweek. Mr. Trump suggested to Mr. Green his stands were not as ad hoc and ideologically jumbled as they seemed, that they were in fact intentional. He was creating “a worker’s party,” a “party of people that haven’t had a real wage increase in 18 years.” “Five, 10 years from now—different party,” he said of the GOP.

He’s trying to make it look different right now. Many Americans, and not only Trump supporters, will like this.

And here is the important political point: Democrats don’t have a playbook for this. They have a playbook to use against normal Republicans: You’re cold, greedy, racist, sexist elitists who hate the little guy.

They don’t have a playbook to use against a political figure like Mr. Trump yet, because he jumbles all the categories. Democrats will wobble around, see what works. For now they’ll stick with saying he’s scary, unstable, right-wing.

It’s going to take them a while to develop a playbook against an independent populist, some of whose advisers hate Republicans more than they do.

Thursday, January 26, 2017

Like millions of Americans who are paying thousands of dollars a year for health insurance no doctors will take, I would love to be flying to Washington this week, pleading with members of Congress, spearheading letter-writing campaigns and appearing as a witness, to tell everyone about my experiences with Obamacare.

But none of us can, because we're too busy working so we can afford to pay for the health care of 22 million poor, entitled or irresponsible people under Obamacare.

Just yesterday, for example, in addition to working, I had to spend an hour -- on top of days and days last month -- figuring out which few remaining clinics provide mammograms under my brand-new, now third Obamacare insurance plan.

My original plan was made "illegal" by Obamacare, and the next two plans -- fully approved under Obamacare -- went bankrupt and were shut down by state and federal regulators.

Now I just have to pray I don't get cancer or break a bone before Obamacare is repealed because, even at $700 a month with a gigantic deductible, there is NO PLAN on the individual market accepted by the two premier hospitals in my area for cancer or broken bones.

Those $700 premiums go to pay for the pregnancies and dental care of welfare recipients and immigrants, not cancer treatment for Ann.

Democrats love to get on their high horses about the wonderful things Obamacare has done for the uninsured. They should be asked why they refuse to live under it.

After they spend 800 hours changing insurance plans every year, ending up with increasingly expensive and increasingly useless plans -- all so that their premiums can pay for the poor -- I'll be fascinated to hear about their love for the downtrodden.

Same with Republicans who are, once again, being bamboozled by lobbyists, to the detriment of their taxpaying constituents who don't have time or money to fly to Washington and tell them our hard-luck stories.

Insurance lobbyists have somehow convinced politicians, who have very little experience in the private sector, that health insurance is wildly different from every other product -- even car insurance and homeowner's insurance -- because of its need for a large pool of enrollees.

Everyone talks about the enrollment problem as if this is a bug unique to the health insurance industry. What product, do they imagine, does not need lots of customers?

How could restaurants afford those chefs, fresh flowers, industrial kitchens, one hundred sets of plates, napkins and silverware and a staff of waiters -- without customers? AHHHH! THEY'LL GO OUT OF BUSINESS!!! THE MODEL DOESN'T WORK WITHOUT LOTS OF PARTICIPANTS! CONGRESS MUST GET INVOLVED.

Publishers couldn't have editors, proofreaders, lawyers, paper plants and marketing departments -- unless there's a large pool of book buyers. Pipe manufacturers couldn't have hundreds of employees, huge machines and factories unless -- you get the idea.

Why is "having customers" treated like some freakish need of this one industry?

People are a lot less interested in buying hotel rooms, restaurant meals and pipes than they are in buying health insurance. Everyone knows someone who has died of cancer or had some other major medical problem, and most people are not insane.

Even with the hell of Obamacare, requiring hundreds of hours of work -- to research, sign up for, be thrown off of, then sign up for a different, ever-more-expensive plan, year after year -- the long-suffering taxpayer is doing all that in order to maintain some form of health insurance.

So apparently, no matter how awful you make it, this is a product Americans are desperate to buy!

Republicans all say they want to save the so-called "good parts" of Obamacare. Because who knows better what the American consumer wants than a member of Congress!

I keep imagining Congress designing a "comprehensive hotel reform bill," promising to save the popular parts: "BUT PEOPLE LIKE HAVING TV'S IN THEIR HOTEL ROOMS!" How could we ever get TVs in hotel rooms without Congress writing a law?

It turns out, people running a business have an uncanny ability to figure out what's popular with their customers.

Any "popular" features of Obamacare obviously, manifestly, inevitably will be preserved by the free market. If parents like keeping their useless millennial kids on their plans, guess what? Any insurance company forced to compete with other insurance companies WILL OFFER THAT.

As for covering people with "pre-existing conditions" -- there are pre-existing conditions and pre-existing conditions. Does this mean the unfortunate few with some exorbitantly expensive medical problem? Or does it mean people who have a "pre-existing condition" because they waited to be diagnosed with cancer before buying insurance?

The first category of people was dealt a bad hand. Eventually, they will be taken care of by the market when excess coverage policies are common and reinsurance companies pop up to cover the primary insurance companies.

Until then, a separate program can pay for the unlucky. That's not a reason to wreck the health insurance market for everyone else. There aren't 22 million people with horrifyingly expensive medical conditions. They're being used as the baby seals to sell subsidized health care for the irresponsible.

The second category is a lot less sympathetic, which is precisely why the two cases are always conflated. You can't buy flood insurance after your house has already floated away.

But we won't let people die in the streets, so -- as Trump said at the very first GOP debate -- they will be dealt with "through a different system." They probably can't go to Sloan Kettering, but then again, neither can I. Right now, my $700 a month pays for them to go to Sloan Kettering.

Both cases are of zero practical importance to the vast majority of people who just want to buy health insurance on the free market, rather than what we're doing now, which is giving shiftless layabouts and irresponsible screw-offs an unlimited health care credit card -- paid for through our insurance premiums.

We'd come to Washington and tell you that, but we're working to pay for the pediatric dental care of illegal aliens.

Remember Ned Ludd from your grade-school history lessons? He was the Occupy Wall Street agitator of his time — a phantom leader of early-19th-century British textile workers who vindictively smashed “spinning jenny” power looms to bits in a desperate bid to halt technological progress.

Now it’s radical feminists hysterically stoking fear and loathing of machines. Revolutionary developments in sonography have endangered their agenda of unrestricted abortion on demand, at all times, no questions asked. The popular diagnostic tools that give parents and doctors around the world an increasingly vivid window to the womb fundamentally undermine Planned Parenthood’s dehumanizing propaganda.

With more and more pregnant women over the past three decades changing their minds about abortion after seeing and hearing the life growing inside of them, the peeved pussyhat brigade is on a mission:

Ultrasounds. Must. Be. Stopped.

The latest salvo in the wimmin’s war on sinister sonograms? It’s a doozy of a screed published this week by Moira Weigel, “writer and a doctoral candidate in comparative literature at Yale University,” in The Atlantic magazine, originally titled, “How the Ultrasound Pushed the Idea that a Fetus Is a Person.”

What a patriarchal jerk, that insidious Mr. Ultrasound is, pushing around such sexist lunacy as the idea that unborn babies are alive!

The original subheading of the article is even better (er, worse): “The technology has been used to create an imaginary ‘heartbeat’ and sped-up videos that falsely depict a response to stimulus.”

Weigel sneered that “there is no heart to speak of” in a six-week-old fetus and used “heartbeat” in scare quotes to assert her scientific authority. She similarly employed those scare quotes to deride “life,” “baby” and “baby bump.”

After actual medical experts and parents exposed Weigel’s Neanderthal ignorance of basic embryology, the ridiculous claim was removed and a sheepish non-correction correction appeared at the end of the biology denier’s piece for the once-august Atlantic.

“This article originally stated that there is ‘no heart to speak of’ in a six-week-old fetus,” the editors’ note admitted. “By that point in a pregnancy, a heart has already begun to form. We regret the error.” (Read it in smarty-pants Saturday Night Live character Emily Litella’s “Neeever mind” voice for full effect.)

Next in the anti-science Atlantic’s investigative series: How X-rays pushed the idea that humans have skeletons! How microscopes pushed the idea that microorganisms exist! How electroencephalograms pushed the idea that human brains send electrical impulses! A deep dive by the intrepid Weigel into the world of “imaginary” bones, bacteria, and beta waves will no doubt yield a Pulitzer nomination if not a Nobel Prize.

Curiously, Weigel raised no objection to the appalling use of ultrasound by Planned Parenthood operatives to harvest unborn baby parts. In 2015, the Center for Medical Progress exposed how Dr. Deborah Nucatola, the abortion giant’s senior director, boasted of using “ultrasound guidance” to improve the quality of coveted organs (“a lot of people want liver”). Ultrasound machines helped their harvesters “know where they’re putting their forceps” to score better prices.

“We’ve been very good at getting heart, lung, liver,” Dr. Nucatola chirped, “because we know that, so I’m not gonna crush that part, I’m gonna basically crush below, I’m gonna crush above, and I’m gonna see if I can get it all intact.”

Ironically enough, we don’t need ultrasound to see quite clearly, through the ghoulish words and barbaric deeds of abortion zealots like Quack Doctor Wanna-be Weigel and Dr. Nucatola, that having a heart doesn’t always guarantee humanity.

Tuesday, January 24, 2017

President Trump delivers his inaugural address at the U.S. Capitol on Friday.

Alex Wong/Getty Images

“The Forgotten Man” is not likely to be forgotten in the Trump presidency. In his inaugural address, the new chief executive promised that “the forgotten men and women of our country will be forgotten no longer. Everyone is listening to you now.” Trump was reprising a mention of “forgotten men and women” made back in November, in his victory speech.

It’s clear why Trump hopes to build a presidency on service to the “forgotten.” The quality of the economic recovery after the financial crisis of 2008 was poor, and to this day many Americans feel they are not back where they were in 2007.

It is all too obvious that the “too big to fail” doctrine favored Wall Street behemoths like Goldman Sachs, as has post-crash statute. Laws such as Dodd-Frank force all kinds of negative consequences upon smaller financial institutions -- call them forgotten banks -- as Senator Bill Cassidy, a Louisiana Republican, noted at the confirmation hearing for Steven Mnuchin, the nominee for Treasury secretary and former Goldman executive.

So who precisely is this Forgotten Man?

In fact, two opposing Forgotten Men figure in American history. Which one Trump actually backs will determine what kind of presidency his ends up being.

The more familiar Forgotten Man was the brainchild of another populist campaigner, Franklin Roosevelt. During the 1932 presidential campaign, a point when two in 10 workers were unemployed, Roosevelt expressed concern for “the forgotten man at the bottom of the economic pyramid.” The New York governor meant the poor man, whose poverty he blamed on a failure of Wall Street.

When he was asked about hiring some executives from the House of Morgan, a bank that loomed as large then as Goldman Sachs does today, FDR rejected the idea outright. “We simply can’t tie up with 23,” the new president said, a reference to the Morgan headquarters at 23 Wall Street.

As president, Roosevelt used his social program, the New Deal, to expand his definition of the Forgotten Man. He moved on from that first group, the poor, to others: the elderly, the infirm and the worker. To him, “the forgotten man” was the vulnerable constituent group which longed for economic and political support.

Roosevelt’s is the first Forgotten Man who comes to mind now. But in those days, another version was just as familiar. That was the one captured by a legendary Yale professor named William Graham Sumner. His Forgotten Man was an anonymous figure, suffering the collateral damage of a project advanced to help the group identified as vulnerable. In Sumner's definition, he was “the man who pays, the man who prays, the man who is not thought of.”

A classical liberal in the U.K. tradition, Sumner therefore rejected any law for special groups: earmarks, targeted social programs, official interest-group organizations, narrow tax breaks. The professor especially abhorred protectionism, then also a plank in the Republican platform, because protectionism benefited a narrow group: New England industrialists. Sumner called protectionism "the ism which teaches that waste makes wealth."

Politically, the attractions of Roosevelt’s Forgotten Man definition are powerful. In his first term, Roosevelt delivered benefits to so many groups -- organized labor especially comes to mind -- that in his second election he took 46 of 48 states.

Economically, the record suggests that Sumner’s forgotten man is the more valuable. After all, the New Deal, as inspiring as it was, did not yield a strong recovery. FDR’s wildly pro-union legislation priced many workers out of the market, thereby failing the very poor Roosevelt had vowed to serve. High unemployment endured right up to World War II.

”Who is the forgotten man in Muncie?” asked an Indiana paper in the late 1930s, doubtless thinking of Sumner’s figure. “I know him as intimately as I know my own undershirt. He is the fellow that is trying to get along without public relief... In the meantime the taxpayers go on supporting many that would not work if they had jobs.”

So which Forgotten Man will Trump make his own? His protectionism, a reversion to ancient Republican trade policy, is seen as a pitch to one such group. But this doctrine only deters economic growth, and favors what you could call "remembered groups," like organized labor, instead of helping "the man who pays."

Some Cabinet selections suggest Trump favors Sumner’s anonymous man or woman. One example is the nominee for Labor secretary, Andy Puzder, the chief executive of CKE Restaurants. While most Labor secretaries have a background in dealing with unions or are otherwise focused on organized labor, they have not always had experience in creating jobs and working with smaller employers like the fast-food industry's franchisees, who employ thousands of nonunion workers. Puzder's focus is on general growth in his industry, not on specific trades with groups.

But other moves by the president suggest a penchant for service to “remembered groups.” Take the decision to pluck Mnuchin, along with several other executives, from Goldman Sachs.

Given the cronyism that characterized the bailout policy of another Goldman alum, Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, the choice of so many of the bank's veterans is disconcerting. Trump, to paraphrase Roosevelt, is “tying up,” not with 23 Wall Street but with 200 West Street, the Goldman headquarters. If anyone is the Forgotten Man, FDR's or Sumner's, it is not Goldman.

In his testimony, Mnuchin emphasized that he stood for general growth, the faith that a stronger economy will pull everyone forward, not just favored groups. The hope is that Trump policy will also do so -- and thereby serve all Forgotten Men.

Amity Shlaes is author of “The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression” (2007).

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Monday, January 23, 2017

And the half-million lemmings who showed up in “solidarity.”

It would be interesting to know how many of the useful idiots donning “pussy hats” at Saturday's massive “Women's March on Washington” had any idea—or even cared to know—who the principal organizers of the event were. The answer is undoubtedly close to zero, since the purpose of the entire charade—like all leftist charades—was merely to give the participants an opportunity to publicly signal their own moral superiority while smearing—as racists and fascists—anyone who doesn't accept socialism, identity politics, and perpetual grievance mongering as the ultimate expressions of the American Dream. But for those who actually have an aversion to mindless indoctrination, the facts will be rather disturbing.

A leading organizer of the Women's March was the Palestinian-American activist Linda Sarsour, executive directorof the Arab American Association of New York. This group was founded shortly after 9/11—not to condemn the attacks, of course, but rather, to lament “the heightened sense of fear and the acts of blatant discrimination aimed at [the Muslim] community” in the racist wasteland known as America. On the premise that all government efforts to forestall additional terrorism constituted Nazi-like fascism, Sarsour and her organization played a central role in pressuring the New York Police Department to terminate its secret surveillance of the many Muslim groups and mosques suspected of promoting jihadism.

Sarsour is also a member of the Justice League NYC, which seeks to draw public attention to what it portrays as an epidemic of police brutality against African American civilians in New York City. The group's constant drumbeat is the claim that the United States is awash in essentially the same ugly strain of racism as was prevalent in the days of slavery and Jim Crow.

An outspoken critic of Israel, Sarsour avvidly supports the Boycott, Divestment & Sanctions (BDS) movement, a Hamas-inspired initiative that uses various forms of public protest, economic pressure, and lawsuits to advance the Hamas agenda of permanently destroying Israel as a Jewish nation-state.

Vis-a-vis the ongoing Arab-Israeli conflict, Sarsour favors a one-state solution where an Arab majority and a Jewish minority would live together within the borders of a single country. She made clear her opposition to Israel's existence as a Jewish state when she tweeted in October 2012 that “nothing is creepier than Zionism.”

In 2004, Sarsour acknowledged that a friend of hers as well as a cousin were both serving long sentences in Israeli jails because of their efforts to recruit jihadists to murder Jews. Moreover, she revealed that her brother-in-law was serving a 12-year prison term because of his affiliation with Hamas.

In October 2011, Linda Sarsour, who holds free-market economics in low regard, expressed, on behalf of “Muslim New Yorkers,” “solidarity and support” for the pro-communist Occupy Wall Street movement. In 2011 as well, the Obama Administration honored Sarsour as a “champion of change.” Not surprisingly, Sarsour visited the White House on at least seven different occasions during her beloved president's tenure.

In May 2012 Sarsour tweeted that the so-called “underwear bomber,” an Al-Qaeda operative who in 2009 had tried to blow up a Detroit-bound passenger jet in mid-flight, was actually a CIA agent participating in America's “war on Islam.”

In November 2012 in Baltimore, Sarsour—ever eager to peddle her woeful tale of Islamic victimhood—spoke at a Muslim Public Affairs Council conference titled “Facing Race: Xenophobic Hate Crimes.” This is the same Council that views the murderous Jew-haters of Hezbollah as members of “a liberation movement” that is “fighting for freedom.”

Sarsour was outraged when a police officer and an FBI agent shot and killed a young black Muslim named Usaama Rahim in Boston on June 2, 2015, when Rahim lunged at them with a military-style knife as they attempted to question him about suspected terrorism-related activities. Naturally, Sarsour's assessment of the incident confidently traced everything back to race: “At the end of the day, a Black man was shot on a bus stop on his way to work and we should treat this like any other case of police violence.” Period. End of story.

According to CounterJihad.com, Sarsour has attended and spoken at numerous rallies sponsored by Al-Awda, a group that views Israel as a terrorist, genocidal state whose very creation was a “catastrophe” for Arab peoples.

Over the years, Sarsour's activism has extended also to racial matters within the United States. For instance, when the black, hoodie-donning Florida teenager Trayvon Martin was killed by a “white Hispanic” man in an infamous 2012 altercation, Sarsour penned an article titled “My Hijab Is My Hoodie” and declared herself “among the millions mourning the killing of Trayvon.” “Blacks in America continue to face racism on a daily basis,” she wrote, “from the workplace to interactions with law enforcement.”

In the aftermath of an August 2014 incident where a white policeman in Ferguson, Missouri had shot and killed a violent black criminal named Michael Brown, Sarsour co-founded the group Muslims For Ferguson, to draw a parallel between the respective forms of oppression allegedly suffered by black and Muslim Americans.

Sarsour is, as the New York Timesputs it, “deeply involved in the Black Lives Matter movement,” a movement founded by three self-identified Marxist revolutionaries who revere the convicted cop-killer and longtime Marxist fugitive Assata Shakur. “I have committed myself wholeheartedly to #BlackLivesMatter,” says Sarsour, who in 2015 penned a Huffington Post piece wherein she depicted African Americans as victims of intransigent and pernicious societal racism and violence.

More than once, Sarsour has expressed her support for Sharia Law. On May 12, 2015, for instance, she posted a Twitter message lauding the fact that Sharia forbids money lenders from charging interest on their loans: “You'll know when you're living under Sharia Law if suddenly all your loans & credit cards become interest free. Sound [sic] nice, doesn't it?”

In November 2015, Sarsour was a featured speaker at the 21st anniversary banquet of the Council on American-Islamic Relations' [CAIR's] San Francisco chapter. Further, she is presently scheduled to speak at upcoming CAIRbanquets in February and March. Terrorism expert Steven Emerson has accurately described CAIR as “a radical fundamentalist front group for Hamas.”

Last June, Sarsour spoke at a Virginia fundraising dinner sponsored by Islamic Relief USA, whose parent group has provided financial aid to Hamas.

In September, Sarsour was a featured speaker at the annual convention of the Islamic Society of North America, a Muslim Brotherhood front group that promotes Sharia Law and Islamic supremacism. The Brotherhood, it should be noted, is the parent group of both Hamas and Al-Qaeda.

In October, Sarsour spoke at an event sponsored by a chapter of the Muslim Students Association, whose national umbrella group is an outgrowth of the Muslim Brotherhood, and whose conferences routinely feature inflammatory speeches by raging anti-Semites.

In November, Sarsour spoke at the annual conference of American Muslims for Palestine (AMP), where she lauded Muslims who “unequivocally support” the Hamas-inspired BDS campaign. AMP is a major BDS promoter, and several of its leading board members and officials were formerly members and/or supporters of Islamic extremist groups that promoted and funded the agendas of Hamas.

In December 2016 in Chicago, Sarsour spoke at the annual (jointly held) convention of the Muslim American Society (whose agendas are dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood) and the Islamic Circle of North America(which, according to Steven Emerson, “openly supports militant Islamic fundamentalist organizations, praises terror attacks, issues incendiary attacks on western values and policies, and supports the imposition of Sharia”). At that convention, Linda Sarsour posed for a picture with Salah Sarsour (no known relation), who was jailed by Israel in the 1990s because of his fundraising activities on behalf of Hamas.

So perhaps we should encourage all the lemmings who flocked to Washington on Saturday to briefly remove their “pussy hats” and take a big ol' bow. It's not often that we get to see hundreds of thousands of people come together to denounce hatred, at an event organized and orchestrated by one of the most noxious and unrepentant haters in America today. It truly was a historic event.